Southern Comforts

Riding the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, you may encounter DIY distilleries, escape-prone ornery bulls, and hills steep enough to threaten marital bonds. But on the Tour d’Epicure, you only have to pedal hard enough to make it to the next great meal.

If there’s a way to attach a whiskey barrel to a bicycle, I’m not seeing it. The barrel isn’t large—about the size of a football, with a two-liter capacity—but still, as I assess the bike, then the handsome white-oak barrel, and then back to the bike, I can’t see a way to engineer it. Not helpful are the amused reactions I’m getting to my pleas for advice: from my cycling tour guide, from the distiller, even from the nice old lady sweeping the distillery’s front porch.

This would be the Copper Fox Distillery, in Sperryville, Virginia,­ where since 2006, in a tin-roofed, cinder-block facility tucked back on a gravel road, Rick Wasmund and his pal Sean McCaskey have been producing a range of small-batch rye and single-malt whiskeys. The whiskeys’ idiosyncratic cool factor stems from the fact that Wasmund, unlike any other North American distiller, malts his own barley for the whiskey, smoking the malt with native fruitwoods rather than the peat of traditional Scotch. Even cooler, Copper Fox will sell you a mini-barrel along with some unaged, cask-strength whiskey, for DIY aging at home. That’s the object of my immediate affection. But how to carry it on a bicycle? Perhaps I could tie it around my neck, like a St. Bernard in the Alps?

Aside from the hills and the overeating (and for honesty’s sake let’s throw in the hangovers), dilemmas like this one may be the toughest challenges of the Tour d’Epicure, a cycling-and-gluttony safari in central Virginia’s Rappahannock County. The two- or five-day tour is the brainchild of John and Diane MacPherson, one of them (John) a former competitive cyclist in California and New England, the other a recreational cyclist, and both refugees from the corporate life who in 2004 bought a faded bed-and-breakfast in unfamiliar territory in order to re-frame their lives around the holy trinity of food, wine, and cycling.

With the Tour d’Epicure, the MacPhersons wanted to bridge the divide they saw between arduous tours that appeal only to devout cyclists (like the rigorous Tour de France–course trip he and Diane took on their honeymoon) and vacations in which barely a pedal is turned. John likes to eat, drink, and, on occasion, kick back with a fat cigar, but he likes to earn the privilege by clocking solid miles on his bike. He likes his guests to work for their consumption, too, with rides of up to 50 miles on rolling terrain. But to John’s mind, the cycling is as much an indulgence as the meals. So before mounting a saddle, guests are first required to do justice to the four-course breakfasts that kick off each cycling day. You might say they have to earn their right to ride.

The eating and the drinking were, to be frank, the primary allures for me. In particular I was motivated by the promise of a Saturday-night dinner at the Inn at Little Washington, a restaurant about which I’d been hearing fervid things for years (and which you’ll be hearing fervid things about, too, a bit later). The cycling component was my wife’s attraction: A long-distance runner, Cat had recently been hobbled after breaking her foot in a fight with a horse (the mare won), and had turned to cycling in order to maintain the peculiar high she derives from cardiovascular self-torture.

(Mathew Rakola)

I hadn’t spent nearly as much time on a bike as I could or probably should have since that halcyon day in 1987 when the state of Arizona awarded me my first driver’s license. But I was intrigued by something Cat has been claiming for years: that her running (and more recently cycling) not only expanded her appetite (that seemed obvious) but also enhanced it, so that, post-exertion, food tastes demonstrably better, as though all that pumped oxygen inflated one’s taste buds or some such physiological voodoo. With this trip, I figured to do some semi-scientific verifying.

Within minutes of our afternoon arrival at the MacPherson’s Foster Harris House B&B, located roughly an hour southwest of Washington, DC, in the much tinier Washington, Virginia (populate 135), we were donning our spandex peels for what was billed as a 22-mile shakedown ride. (I confess this was a new usage for me, my previous definition having had something to do with blackmail.) Foster Harris is a friendly old Victorian farmhouse, and, unlike most B&Bs of my experience, it isn’t overstuffed with saccharine antiques and festooned with crazed blooms of doilies. Another distinction: Most B&Bs lack the charming feature of a garage devoted exclusively to bikes.

There we found John outfitting the four other couples in our group (the tour maxes out at 10). Three of the guests were in the medical profession and cast wary glances at the plastic boot cast on Cat’s leg. (“No worries!” she exclaimed. “I’ll take it off to ride.”) Another member of the group worked for the CIA, and therefore saw right through my spandex ruse, instinctively profiling me as a gluttonous interloper. “Stick with me,” he said, an instant mentor.

The Tour d’Epicure’s course is comprised of a varying array of loops tailored to each group’s ambitions and abilities. Our first afternoon’s ride would be about 18 miles to the Copper Fox Distillery, for a tour of the facility, then 4 miles back to the Foster Harris House to suit up for dinner. Cat and I each rode a Giant OCR 2 from John and Diane’s fleet, and I can lodge no complaints about the road bikes save for the lack of a handy accessory for toting whiskey barrels. (I should note that Diane rescued me from that dilemma by tossing the little barrel into the tour’s sweeper van.) In a churlish mode, I could snivel about the hills there in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, but then it’s always unwise to pick fights with geology (as with horses).

Rappahannock County is rife with ridges and valleys formed by a few million years of sedimentary rock folding and faulting in a concentrated ploy to wreak lactic-acid havoc on the hams of future cyclists. After the first hour or so, however, I was surprised to find myself almost enjoying the hills, or at least developing a weird affection for them. Given my long interludes away from the bicycle, I considered each hill crest to be a small but significant­ goalpost, and the reward for achieving the goal was a sweet, ­air-conditioned downhill glide that felt luxurious and childlike, the 35-mph downhill yang to the grueling uphill yin—an agreeable strain of bipolar disorder, I decided. There’s a metaphor for life in there but I don’t wish to overdo things.

(Mathew Rakola)

So let’s cue up the slideshow: Gorgeous dressage horses blithely chomping grass as we’d go whizzing by. A rust-colored fox scooting across a wavy green sea of rye. Curvy descents into glens on back roads shaded with beech, linden, and maple boughs. The geometric beauty of vineyard rows, stitched across hilltops. Perfect little farms, idyllic in that nostalgic Currier & Ives way, with Eggs For Sale signs tilted out front. A celebrity mansion or two, pointed out by John. Herds of cattle, bleating at our passage. The ultravibrant green of chilled spring pea soup with black-truffle espuma, lobster and orzo—but there I’m getting ahead of myself.

Glen Gordon Manor was our dinner destination. A former hunting lodge, the 45-acre property—with its stone-manor house, stables, and gardens wedged into the indigo shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains—has since 2006 belonged to Dayn Smith and his wife, Nancy Moon, who operate it as B&B, equestrian center, and, occasionally, a private restaurant. Smith owns three restaurants in Puerto Rico, with a cooking résumé that includes stints as executive chef at New York City’s UN Plaza Hotel (when he was just 21) and St. Moritz Hotel. He and John met outside a restaurant one night, shortly after they’d both moved to Rappahannock County, and, bonding over kids and food, became fast friends; dinner at Glen Gordon has become a tour staple. We began with scallops grilled a la plancha, with galette potatoes, ribbons of chorizo sausage, and a garlicky chimichurri sauce; moved onto that spring pea soup then a portobello carpaccio with a port-shallot jam and baby arugula dappled with 50-year-old balsamic vinegar; then dug into a waterfowl trifecta of slow-roasted duck breast, duck confit with corn-and-wild rice pancakes, and goose foie gras served atop savory French toast. Perhaps it was the private room, with its ornately valanced curtains and stateroom vibe, or perhaps the way the conversations orbited around a single subject (cycling), or maybe it was just the CIA presence at my table, but the meal had the feel of a summit dinner, as if tomorrow we’d all be hunkered over conference tables hashing out trade and security issues. We wouldn’t be, of course. We’d just be pedaling. And eating more.

John and Diane are playful with their breakfasts. A quaver of fear runs through you when, after polishing off ginger scones, a fruit-and-yogurt parfait, and poached eggs with raspberry-and-chipotle-glazed bacon, you note from the chalkboard menu that a pancake course remains to come. But the pancakes are silver-dollar-sized, a demure little two-bite stacklet—breakfast dessert.

John—who, at 47, has a boyish face that contrasts starkly with the gray in his hair, and who’s quick and loose with stories and smiles—stayed beside me for the morning’s 20-mile ride, recounting his cycling origins: about riding an rattly old kid bike back and forth to a summer job in his teens, and the day a jersey-clad guy whipped by him and thereby kindled a competitive flame that would fire him through 21 years of racing. Oh, and the bull story: about the time John was leading a tour group up a hill when a kid on a four-wheeler­ came revving down, madly warning them off the road. Everyone pulled off and crouched in the high roadside grass as a loose and very ornery bull went hurtling past, headed downhill after the kid, a few moments later.

(Mathew Rakola)

By noon we were drinking: sprawled in lawn chairs at the Philip Carter Winery in Hume, rehydrating with a chilled rosé made from a rarely seen Portuguese grape varietal called tinto cào. With our lunch—fish en papillote—arrived more bottles, including a blend of vidal blanc and chardonnay the vintners call Governor Fauquier, after the elected official who certified the Carter family’s winemaking venture in 1763.

These and other bottles confirmed my opinion that Virginia is producing some of the best wines east of the...well, east of the West Coast, and not by any small margin. These and other bottles also left me feeling lazy and contented enough to consider bagging the 20-mile return trip, as most of the group did. (“I’m not really used to drinking midway through a ride,” I overheard someone say.) But my wife, in cahoots with the CIA, was hearing none of it. Four of us set off for what John grinningly cautioned was “the most challenging” section of the tour.

That’s partly owing to Divorce Hill, which appears on one of the quiet country roads near the end of the ride, jutting sharply upward for a third of a mile. John and Diane coined the name after a young couple honeymooning at the Foster Harris House—the groom a cyclist, the bride not—took some bikes out for a spin, encountered the climb, and came frighteningly close to marital collapse as the bride cursed her groom while walking her bike uphill. Half a decade later John was tickled to hear a noncycling local refer to it as Divorce Hill; the name had stuck.

In my case it was different: My bride made it up and over far ahead of me, but the only curses I uttered came when a pair of big mutty dogs came charging out of their hilltop yard. I managed a quick downhill escape, leaving the CIA to fight off the dogs. An ignoble act, in retrospect, but he took his vengeance by blurring past me on the final half-mile, a Mark Cavendish to my foolhardy and premature breakaway rider. In the course of 40 miles we’d climbed more than 3,000 feet, John informed us, which said to me that I was ready to put my wife’s theory to the test: dinnertime.

Patrick O’Connell started the Inn at Little Washington inside a converted auto-repair shop in 1978. At the time, he seemed clearly delusional. World-class cuisine in the middle of nowhere, more than 60 miles from a city? Who would come? The answer turned out to be everyone, and O’Connell went on to have one of the most storied careers in American chefdom, helping to pioneer the farm-to-table movement (out of necessity, as much as anything else, since the only staple he could get delivered was milk) and paving the way for destination chefs such as Thomas Keller—and this without ever abandoning the kitchen for casino-­based franchises or Food Network series or other cheffy temptations. (At 67 he still runs the line.) I started with lamb carpaccio with Caesar salad ice cream, followed by hot and cold foie gras with Sauternes jelly and rhubarb marmalade, then found myself swooning over curry-dusted veal sweetbreads with morels, Virginia country ham, and pappardelle pasta.

(Mathew Rakola)

We drank great gobs of the house wine ­produced by the standard-bearer of Virginia wineries, Barboursville Vineyards. We all bitched good-naturedly about the hills. Someone calculated that those of us who’d ridden the full loop had burned as much as 4,000 calories, and with that arithmetic—wishful though it might have been—vacuumed all the sinfulness out of dessert. We managed a full-table crackup when one of the doctors told a story from his residency days about an unmistakably pregnant young woman who’d marked on her pre-exam form that she was not sexually active. When he gingerly asked for clarification, she replied, “Oh, yeah. I’m not active. I usually just lie there.” As to Cat’s theory about the effects of exertion on the way we perceive flavors: very promising, but the evidence, alas, was insufficient. A meal like that requires no endorphin enhancement. Unless, of course, the magnificence of the dinner was the direct result of the cycling, and I was too blockheaded to realize it.

But I should note, as a postscript, that I’m still investigating. Recently I came across a 2010 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in which mice showed a preference for food they had to work for, and that exertion made previously unappetizing food tastier.­ Nowadays you’re as likely as not to find me on a bike, navigating the little river roads of my New Jersey homeland, newly enchanted by that balance between gluttony and exertion, that symbiosis of pleasure and strain, that I discovered on that rippled and rolling Virginia landscape. As John said about his tour philosophy: “Every effort should end with a reward.” And a whiskey barrel.